Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired has a new book coming out on July 7th called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. With a fascinating glimpse into Anderson’s copy-and-paste-without-attribution writing technique, Waldo Jaquith writes in The Virginia Quarterly Review [online]:
In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources.
Jaquith then offers a comparison between text taken from Wikipedia and the final print version of Anderson’s book:
[Jaquith's complete article including extended examples of Anderson plagiarizing]
Anderson took a last-minute 5th grade approach to writing. He found the Wikipedia listing for “Usury” and pasted the text into his manuscript. His reply to Jaquith’s accusation is flaccid at best:
